Posted on 12/04/2003 11:37:40 AM PST by Holly_P
My husband and I married at the Denver County courthouse in 1999. The judge's secretary, a black woman, didn't hide her surprise that I was black and the groom was white. Even on the cusp of the 21st century in the progressive West, I guess it was still shocking for a black woman and a white man to marry.
But at least it was technically legal, unlike in Alabama at the time. It wasn't until 2000 that Alabama residents voted to remove a provision from that state's constitution that declared that "the legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or descendant of a Negro." Though this law, which was created in 1901, wasn't enforceable after 1967, clerks in some Alabama counties still denied marriage licenses to interracial couples.
Alabama was the last state to remove such laws from its books. But Colorado shouldn't exactly congratulate itself. This state didn't repeal its anti-miscegenation laws until 1957, six years after my house was built.
The case that changed everything was the aptly named Loving vs. Virginia. Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, were married in Washington, D.C., in 1958. After they went back home to Virginia, they were arrested for having an "invalid" marriage license and violating the state's Racial Integrity Act. The Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a year in jail. The judge, Leon Bazile, suspended the sentence for 25 years as long as the Lovings left the state, though one could hardly call him sympathetic. In his ruling, he invoked God to uphold a racist law: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
So I get suspicious when people start talking about "protecting" marriage by banning people of the same sex from marrying. ("As if marriage were some kind of paradise," my husband thoughtfully adds.) I get suspicious when people say that gay marriage will force Americans to recognize "ungodly" relationships. The same arguments used to "defend" my marriage today were first used to deny ones like it. Blacks and whites intermarrying and interbreeding was the original slippery slope to the downfall of American civilization. Racist interpretation of religious teachings was just one justification used against blacks and whites marrying. Another common contention was that interracial marriage wasn't a healthy environment for children. Ultimately, all the rationalizations boiled down to this: Blacks were inferior and would contaminate whites with second-rate genes. Indeed, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act (passed after World War I) set out "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens" and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens" and "the obliteration of racial pride."
You can cloak bigotry in religion, pseudo-science or mom-and-apple-pie patriotism, but it's still bigotry. Only I suspect bigotry isn't the only impulse behind opposition to gay marriage. I think people are afraid. As a society, we are overwhelmed by swift technological, economic, social and cultural changes. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 made us feel even more vulnerable. Perhaps it's human nature to create a bogeyman and channel fears of the unknown toward it. But I don't see how trying to control (and legislate) the actions of others will give any of us a greater sense of control over our own lives.
Personally, I find the upcoming televised wedding of two people who "fell in love" during six weeks of taping a reality TV show scary. However, there's nothing to be done about it because straight people are free to marry for any reason, including money. Besides, who am I to judge?
Despite the judge's secretary and funny looks from a few others, my husband and I have been married almost five years. Granted, our marriage is no paradise, but it's happy more often than not, and it's legal. I wish all couples, gay and straight, the same.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Carleen Brice is taking time off from work to finish a novel. She lives in Denver with her husband, and can be reached at carleenbrice@aol.com . Applications for Colorado Voices are accepted in February.
Big difference. The threat to those of racist mindset wasn't that inter-racial marriage changed the definition of what a marriage was. They were afraid precisely because it was a real marriage, with the "frightening" (in their opinion) prospect of "mixed-race" offspring.
That's not at all the issue with "gay marriage."
With the tiny, miniscule exception that one is right & the other is wrong.
I just talked to my grand father who was around in 1960 and before. He told me that he didn't know anyone who argued that inter racial marriage was immoral. He knew plenty of people who were against it because they were just plain bigots.
Of course that doesn't prove anything any more than your assertations of "trust me" does.
No doubt it will. And a generation after that, videos of little kids having sex with animals will be shown during ABC's family hour, and nobody will think anything of it. None of the inconstancy of man-made morality has anything to do with objective right and wrong. You are talking about how popular perceptions & sensibilities change over time -- I don't dispute that, I just maintain that it is irrelevant. Morality is not determined democratically.
Homosexuality is an identity, just like heterosexuality or skin color. It is not an act.
Right NOW, you can't see that. I suspect many people in 1958 would similarly have been unable to conceive of someone seriously equating race relations with homosexual marriage, yet here we are. Since you obviously aware of the changing (liberalizing) trend in culture, what makes you think it's going to suddenly stop at some point? It's an arbitrary standard to claim that a person who is 17 years and 364 days old should be a non-sexual being and lacks a right to form binding agreement, but that the next day they are suddenly ready to do whatever they want. There's no reason why future cultural "progress" can't define that age of consent down to at least the age where a child can speak. Just because it's unimaginable to YOU doesn't mean it's not going to happen.
In the end, I don't see allowing two gay people to marry as a slide toward rampant immorality. I think divorce is probably worse for nation's character. Cheers.
I happen to agree on both counts. I don't particularly care what sort of contracts homosexuals wish to form in order to codify their defilement of each other -- I do oppose calling it marriage, because the government can no more legitimately declare two men "married" than it can declare a dead man "alive". I don't think health insurers, adoption agencies, etc., ought to be required to treat someone as a spouse who really isn't. But we're all pretty much screwed already anyhow, so I won't care that much if "gay marriage" becomes commonplace. But for this author to compare race to homosexuality is thoroughly insulting.
Well, good for Rosie O'Donnell! :-)
Bill and Mary are entitled to opt in to a legal and cultural arrangement with a rich tradition and array of formal trappings, but George and Poindexter are not. There is no regulated system for them to simply "opt in" to. They have to go step by step and set up all the legal arrangements themselves.
That's inconvenient, but what is sad for George and Poindexter is that people in their lives don't accord their relationship the same respect as they do Bill and Mary's.
I feel for them, I do, they were born (or they became, whatever) different from heterosexuals, and, well, life is going to be different for them.
Perhaps, though, we need to use the head more than the heart, and think long and hard before committing the awesome power of government to the quixotic task of leveling that particular playing field.
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